Reply 1100 of 1111, by Vaporeon

Examples would be any nvidia GPU with recent-ish drivers. I have personally tested a wide range of cards from the 6600GT to the GTX1080, and they all do not render the glass bumpmap. Neither do AMD cards for that matter. I suspect this is due to the games config.txt system that has a whole bunch of now irreverent vendor-specific hacks in it, recent Intel iGPU's seem to work better that anything else natively (render-correctness wise) and conveniently there are no entries for those in the file. New nvidia and amd/ati cards get caught by wildcard entries.

I am well aware of the Refined stuff, in fact you should look at the credits file some time. Anyway, it essentially is one giant hack, the glass in those maps for example is just faked using the somewhat working water shader instead. While this does look better than the broken the glass you see on current GPU's in some cases, it will always be worse that the real glass shader working as it should have been. Faking effects that way has severe limitations, the bitmap textures for water as an example are limited to half the resolution of what can be used on glass in Halo.

I do like the Refined project for that game and it is superior to stock, but make no mistake it is a compromise of making the best out of the worst by working around limitations with game assets only, rather than truly fixing them in the engine. Being a closed source game there is only so much you can do.

If it is possible dgVoodoo2 can give provide what the game is expecting when it attempts to render these shaders, it would be a massive improvement over what we currently have.

thx for your feedback. Unfortunately I didn't have yet time to look into the problems, but I'm going to.
And for the time being, I'm planning to release a separate version for this game until I merge that into 'main' dgVoodoo.

Vaporeon,
I'm not that familiar with Halo, but that broken shader thing looks interesting. 😀 I'll give it a shot.

batterymandark wrote:Not trying to nag a hole in your head, but do you think this can be solved in the next update?
I'v also tryed the new feature wh […]Show full quote

Not trying to nag a hole in your head, but do you think this can be solved in the next update?
I'v also tryed the new feature where the resolution is set afterward , DeferredScreenModeSwitch
but that doesn't work. And this issue has been there since the first dgvoodoo that supported DirecX9.

Avp GoG uses DX9 render, if you ever wonder, but the vanilla is in Dx7 if my memory serve me right, but that gives garbled colors in the menu.

No, sorry, I promised to fix it. I just forgot about that as usual... Good new is, it's fixed in the new version. Btw, that game is really locked to 640x480?

ZellSF wrote:

Disciples III (demo) lightning still definitely looks very wrong.

Sadly, yes. And SkyDrift is still rendering wrong. I looked into those problems but didn't yet figure out what is done improperly on dgVoodoo side.
Hopefully I'll be able to fix them later.

However, I couldn't reproduce the shadow problem with Dragon Age origins. Appears the same both with dgVoodoo and natively for me.

batterymandark wrote:Not trying to nag a hole in your head, but do you think this can be solved in the next update?
I'v also tryed the new feature wh […]Show full quote

Not trying to nag a hole in your head, but do you think this can be solved in the next update?
I'v also tryed the new feature where the resolution is set afterward , DeferredScreenModeSwitch
but that doesn't work. And this issue has been there since the first dgvoodoo that supported DirecX9.

Avp GoG uses DX9 render, if you ever wonder, but the vanilla is in Dx7 if my memory serve me right, but that gives garbled colors in the menu.

No, sorry, I promised to fix it. I just forgot about that as usual... Good new is, it's fixed in the new version. Btw, that game is really locked to 640x480?

Ah that's very nice.

The game is not locked in 640x480, other than the menu, but when GoG released it, they didn't even bother to resize the font.
so good luck trying to read the in-game text on anything higher than 1080p or 4k which will turn the font into ants.

batterymandark wrote:Not trying to nag a hole in your head, but do you think this can be solved in the next update?
I'v also tryed the new feature wh […]Show full quote

Not trying to nag a hole in your head, but do you think this can be solved in the next update?
I'v also tryed the new feature where the resolution is set afterward , DeferredScreenModeSwitch
but that doesn't work. And this issue has been there since the first dgvoodoo that supported DirecX9.

Avp GoG uses DX9 render, if you ever wonder, but the vanilla is in Dx7 if my memory serve me right, but that gives garbled colors in the menu.

No, sorry, I promised to fix it. I just forgot about that as usual... Good new is, it's fixed in the new version. Btw, that game is really locked to 640x480?

Ah that's very nice.

The game is not locked in 640x480, other than the menu, but when GoG released it, they didn't even bother to resize the font.
so good luck trying to read the in-game text on anything higher than 1080p or 4k which will turn the font into ants.

Had a quick look, and I did discover something with the dgvoodoo 2.6 4.jul.2019 release.
the upscaling only works when the game is set to 640x480.

Any other resolution the resolution changing happened, and its seems dgvoodoo "misses" it and won't upscale.

not sure how this will effect the FOV since its in 640x480 and the GoG release was supposed to be nice for widescreens.
unless dgvoodoo gets a hotfix or maybe if 640x480 messes up the games FOV , maybe it would be possible to patch the exe file to render the game in 640x360 or 720x480 when 640x480 is selected.

thx for your feedback. Unfortunately I didn't have yet time to look into the problems, but I'm going to.
And for the time being, I'm planning to release a separate version for this game until I merge that into 'main' dgVoodoo.

I really appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. I am looking forward to the release of a next bug fix version.

Reply 1107 of 1111, by aaudev

AAUnlimited dev here. Thank you for creating the alternative dll that works with AA2. Many of us have the same issue with textures that Arkblade reported above, myself included. I want to notify you that I intend to make a release of our mod software with your dll included, renamed to "dgd3d9.dll". You can see our homepage at https://github.com/aa2g/AA2Unlimited

Vaporeon wrote:Examples would be any nvidia GPU with recent-ish drivers. I have personally tested a wide range of cards from the 6600GT to the […]Show full quote

Examples would be any nvidia GPU with recent-ish drivers. I have personally tested a wide range of cards from the 6600GT to the GTX1080, and they all do not render the glass bumpmap. Neither do AMD cards for that matter. I suspect this is due to the games config.txt system that has a whole bunch of now irreverent vendor-specific hacks in it, recent Intel iGPU's seem to work better that anything else natively (render-correctness wise) and conveniently there are no entries for those in the file. New nvidia and amd/ati cards get caught by wildcard entries.

I am well aware of the Refined stuff, in fact you should look at the credits file some time. Anyway, it essentially is one giant hack, the glass in those maps for example is just faked using the somewhat working water shader instead. While this does look better than the broken the glass you see on current GPU's in some cases, it will always be worse that the real glass shader working as it should have been. Faking effects that way has severe limitations, the bitmap textures for water as an example are limited to half the resolution of what can be used on glass in Halo.

I do like the Refined project for that game and it is superior to stock, but make no mistake it is a compromise of making the best out of the worst by working around limitations with game assets only, rather than truly fixing them in the engine. Being a closed source game there is only so much you can do.

If it is possible dgVoodoo2 can give provide what the game is expecting when it attempts to render these shaders, it would be a massive improvement over what we currently have.

which glass are you talking about?

Found an interesting 'bug'

in StarLancer, when you open the controls settings while in a mission, the text smears and then at random times, clears up.

What game refers to as shader_transparent_glass. Halo uses a "tag" system for game assets that act as an abstraction to stuff like the games shaders. It's implementation is a bit broken and varies between real GPU types. shader_transparent_water has issues too between card types, other shader classes are consistently broken so they work as expected. Halo is a fun game 🤣.

What that other guy as referring to with the refined maps change all shader_transparent_glass tags to the less broken shader_transparent_water made to look like glass.